Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

"Compelling. . . . By focusing on cannibalism, sex, and gender . . . [presents] the relationship between discourse and power in the unfolding of empire." -Carole Blackburn, The University of British Columbia

Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote ex...